Debbie Cohen, MD, director of the Clinical Hypertension Program at Penn Medicine, doesn’t mince words when talking about the smartphone apps and kiosks in malls and pharmacies that take blood pressure. “People shouldn’t be using them,” said Cohen. “The readings can be completely inaccurate.”

When he was in fifth grade, Emile Mohler III built a wooden incubator with his father’s help, and picked up 25 fertilized chicken eggs at a Federal Poultry Research facility in Beltsville, Maryland. He wanted to see how the chick embryos progressed each day before hatching. Thus began a life of scientific experimentation and discovery.

Gestational Diabetes Mellitus (GDM) is the most common type of diabetes diagnosed during pregnancy; it is also one of the most common pregnancy complications, affecting up to 18 percent of expecting women. Yet most women don’t learn much about the condition until after they are diagnosed. At 33 weeks into my pregnancy, I failed a glucose tolerance test and was diagnosed with GDM. Nothing really prepares you to hear a bad diagnosis.

The term “heart surgery” carries with it a certain amount of baggage: mostly some combination of grisly imagery and long, difficult recoveries. Thankfully, recent developments to both the technology and technique have resulted in a field rapidly evolving to improve the safety and comfort of one particular procedure that had, until recently, been hugely invasive.

Our lives, our careers, our homes are now dependent on technology, and all the time we spend using it can have a negative impact on our health. The overuse of digital technology can hurt your eyes, your posture and your ability to get a good night’s sleep.

The Legacy Program, launched earlier this year by Penn Medicine’s Abramson Cancer Center, seeks to help patients tell their own stories that they can share with loved ones. The monthly sessions are for patients who have received a cancer diagnosis, either recent or years past.

Depression is the leading cause of illness and disability worldwide. To help raise awareness about it, the World Health Organization launched a global campaign, called “Depression: Let’s Talk,” to encourage health care providers and people who are living with mental illness to seek the treatment they need.

“For a lot of these patients, it’s been a revolving door,” Barnett said. “It’s a tough population. We treat them, they leave, and they come back to be revived again. There’s more hope now that they’ll get treatment.”

Every brain injury is different. Traumatic brain injury may result in some physical changes, such as seizures and temporary paralysis, but the majority of the lingering difficulties experienced by brain injury survivors are unnoticeable to the average passerby, often leading to painful and dangerous stigma.

When a doctor tells a patient there are no realistic paths for curative treatment, the doctor needs to be confident about that. Yet with so many experimental therapies, promising new drugs, and clinical trials offering hope to even the sickest of patients, how can any doctor, even the best doctor, be sure?